How Acviss Is Helping Brands Fight Counterfeiting Using Blockchain, Other Technologies

Counterfeiting is an age-old hazard for businesses. It hampers the revenue flow and causes financial losses. The reputational damage it causes to brands is even bigger.

Pirates are a big threat to businesses even in today’s age of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and digital currencies. While technology is smart, scamsters are getting smarter with equal finesse. Look at NFTs. The very concept of NFTs is uniqueness and non-fungible. However, fraudsters often find a way around it to deceive gullible victims.

Counterfeits are rampant in pharma, farm and food products, fashion and cosmetics, and plywood, among others. Ecommerce is another space where counterfeiters are having a field day. In May this year, the Delhi High Court asked Snapdeal, Meesho, and Amazon to take down counterfeit products from their platforms. 

Quoting from a case study, Vikas Jain, founder and CEO of Acviss Technologies, a brand protection tech startup, said that India loses about 4%, or over 10 Mn tonnes, of food output a year due to fake pesticides.

Counterfeits account for up to 30% of the $4 Bn pesticides and crop seed market, he said citing a government-endorsed study.

No wonder, a study by Acviss estimates that the global anti-counterfeit market will cross $208.3 Bn by 2023, growing at a rate of 10.9%. The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is the fastest-growing anti-counterfeit market. 

Bengaluru-based Acviss offers new-age anti-counterfeiting solutions to brands to protect their business.

What Brands Can Do To Prevent Piracy 

To protect themselves from counterfeiting, brands often adopt a reactive approach, i.e., register a complaint with the law enforcement agencies which conduct raids on the premises of scamsters. The maximum brands normally do is take legal action. 

“They should actually be doing strict monitoring, finding out such sellers, and stopping counterfeiting through technology. Some are using tech, but most of them are reactive only,” said Jain. 

Usage Of Holograms With New Tech 

Holograms are the commonly deployed tool to fight pirates. However, they have their own limitations, according to Jain. While holograms offer lots of features, the verification process is too cumbersome for buyers. A customer may require a magnifying lens to see the micro text in the hologram.

Besides, holograms can themselves be counterfeited these days. Smart alecs are out there, particularly in China, who can replicate holograms, even if they are not exactly the same.

Hence, it is important for brands to use more and more tech to make the authentication process a seamless exercise. According to Jain, holograms can be the base and tech can be added to it.

Talking about the technology used by Acviss, Jain said, “We are doing multiple things. Our core is to give a unique, non-identical identity to each and every physical product which makes them non-replicable. We also use tamper-evident technology so that if somebody tries to even remove the identity, it can be understood that it is tampered.” 

So, how practical is it to have a unique identity for crores of units of a product? According to Jain, there are two ways to do this. “You can either add it as part of the packaging directly. If it’s happening as the direct packaging when the box gets done, you can add it at that time. After the unit is packed, you can basically apply it as a label in the form of a specialised label. Automated applicators can be used to enable or make it easy.” 

While this adds to the manufacturing cost, the extra profits which brands earn often outweigh the additional cost. Brands otherwise lose this profit to counterfeits. The extra cost should be seen as an investment that brings back the revenue or adds to the revenue.

Acviss’ ‘Affordable’ Solutions For Brands

Formed two years ago in March 2020, Acviss has been cash-flow positive since Day 1 of business, Jain said. “We had a customer on board even before we deployed our product.” It closed FY2022 with a revenue of INR 4.20 Cr and is targeting a revenue of INR 7.5 Cr in FY23. It gets most of its revenue from the private sector, with FMCG and agriculture being the top two sectors. While FMCG contributes 30% to its revenue, around 20% comes from agriculture. The rest is divided between electronics, plywood, and consumables. 

Truviss, the brand-protection software developed by Acviss, gets lots of queries from the fashion, cosmetics, and health industries, Jain said. Close to 5% of the startup’s revenue comes from the health and pharma space. 

“We also have a couple of customers in the bullion space. Many times people sell high-value products in the name of established brands. We also have a couple of customers in certificate space. A few universities are also working with us,” Jain said.

The pricing, however, depends on the level of security required for the product. It is a little higher for products that require more layers of security. A high-value product such as gold for sure will require many layers of security. The pricing also depends on the substrate used and how verification will happen.

However, one of the competitive advantages which Aviss enjoys is affordability, according to Jain. While it has adopted a mobile-first approach, Acviss also ensures end-to-end integration. Its packaging is non-replicable and technologies patented too. 

Acviss helps brands understand their complete footprint online and if somebody unauthorised is selling their products on marketplaces. It also warns brands if somebody has come up with a fake domain name, a similar-sounding domain, or a fake look-alike website.

“If there’s a domain or a website similar to the original website it could be brought down through our process…We are kind of helping them take down these sites or take down the social media links, even fake apps,” Jain said.

The bootstrapped startup also gives brands a machine learning algorithm to help them categorise things which could be hurtful to the brand image.

Acviss, which works with 80 companies currently, both domestic and foreign, offers anti-counterfeiting, non-replicable packaging solutions. Blockchain and online anti-counterfeiting services are its other fortes.

Few competitors offer a suite as diverse as Acviss. For example, while Avery Dennison Corp of the US, CCL Industries of Canada, 3M Company of the US, and DuPont Pharm are present in the anti-counterfeiting packaging space, Redpoins, Brandverity, BrandShield, MarkMonitor, Opsec, among others, are online anti-counterfeiting providers.  

How Blockchain Can Help

Blockchain technology can be deployed as a solution to the problem of counterfeiting. A shared immutable ledger that records every transaction and each movement of a product at every level makes counterfeiting next to impossible. It holds particularly true for digital NFTs. With blockchain, one can get to know who owns the NFT. Blockchain carries a ledger which tells who currently owns the token or an art form. Since it is decentralised, an individual can verify the rightful owner without the help of a central authority.

“On the physical form as well, if you want to be able to provide additional security, anti-counterfeiting technology comes into picture,” Jain said. 

Acviss also has a blockchain-based platform and has onboarded coffee brands on it. The startup has also developed a ‘no internet’ blockchain-based traceability application for the Coffee Board of India. This app is designed to protect coffee production from counterfeiting.

Acviss has also developed a special label for the Coffee Board which is then applied to the coffee packages to digitise the physical bags. These bags, when moved from one stage to another, record each and every transaction that takes place in the whole supply chain. This whole development can then be viewed on a smartphone where the consumer gets complete visibility of the product details on the marketplace.

This anti-counterfeiting solution helps reorganise the unstructured supply chain and protects farmers from fraud and fake GI tag products with the help of quality evaluation.

The Coorg region in Karnataka is known for its coffee. A lot of times people try to sell coffee from other regions as Coorg coffee because it attracts a premium. However, Acviss’ blockchain technology helps verify if the coffee is actually coming from Coorg or not. 

With the help of the startup’s solutions, Coorg’s coffee farmers are able to compete with bigger brands such as Starbucks, Coffee Day, among others, Jain said.

Blockchain, however, might not be a solution for every brand as there are a few factors that need to be considered like the size and complexity of the supply chain, the value of the target product, and the level of counterfeiting occurring with regard to the brand. 

Hence, it is important for brands to be alert and keep looking for the deployment of new technologies to tackle counterfeiting and protect their businesses.

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